The Phantom Legacy Rewrite
by Green Wayfinder123
Summary: Let's be honest. I'm surprised. I never thought that moving to this place would change my life forever. I guess it just runs in the family.


Have you ever been in a horrible situation and wondered how you got there? Why you're there, what you did to deserve what you got?

How about sitting in a cold, dark, damp cell, separated from your family, expected to be tortured for centuries by a fractured legal sytem of ghosts? Where you can hear the screams and wails of the condemned, where death hangs in the air like a thick, heavy blanket? That's a really introspectional moment.

What could I have done differently?

Scenarios and choices go through my head.

If you want to know what happened, I might as well start here.

I should warn you: this is going to be a depressing, scary, crappy story. This is your last chance to chicken out. No, seriously, you can just leave. No strings attached or anything. I swear.

For those of you who are still here, you are all nuts. Who'd want to just sit around, listening to this kid's tale of really, really stupid choices? That's right, crazy people. The ones who dove off the deep end, whose cheese slipped off their cracker.

Okay, enough with the crazy people jokes.

My name is Silas Fenton. I'm fourteen. People say I'm weird, but to me, everyone is just too normal. I like drawing and reading, and if you saw me, you'd probably think, 'Oh, it's just a skinny kid who's never going anywhere.'

Oh, if you could live my life for just three minutes...

When I was a kid, people just knew me by my last name. 'Fenton' was pretty much a sacred term where I lived, in sunny Florida, where the weather was annoyingly volitale, and the pople reflected that. First, kids act as if they're your best friend and adults sucked up to you to please your dad. Then in the blink of an eye, everyone looked down on you and treated you like scum on the bottom of their shoe.

Teachers were harder on you when you made a mistake on a quiz or answered a question wrong. Classmates and people in the halls at school only interacted with you to boost themselves up on the social food chain. No one cares who you are as a person. All they know is 'Fenton,' and that's where they draw the line. It was just better to pretend they weren't even there and just stay away from them.

Do you know how awful living under your parents' good name and everyone's strict expectations is?

So one day, I decided I was done. I just quit caring about school, and to this day, I still have a couple of scars from fights I'd gotten into. I'm surprised I passed the eighth grade.

People were pretty disappointed with how I came out; snapping at teachers, glaring and insulting classmates who decided to tick me off. My parents got more than a few calls and letters about my behavior and performance at school. They wouldn't understand. They had no idea what I went through just waiting at the bus stop to go to school. People would whisper and gossip about me behind my back, as if they though I wouldn't hear them. But I did.

"It's that Fenton kid."

"Isn't his dad the astronaut?"

"I hear he's gonna fight that one guy from science class."

After years of this, I just wanted to show people I was not, and never would be, my parents. I was me, just me. That's all I wanted.

It's not like I hated my mom and dad, no way. I loved them like any kid would love their parents.

My dad is Daniel Fenton and my mom is Samantha Fenton, but everyone just calls them Danny and Sam. Dad used to be an astronaut until NASA had some serious budget cuts. Nowadays, though, he teaches astrnomy and calculus at local colleges. He's a big burly kind of guy with black hair and blue eyes who cares for me and Mom and my sister more than anything in the world. He's got

Mom is an environmentalist who engineers types of crops that don't need as much water or sunlight, and has a Ph.D in the nature of animals. She's all about saving the world and being your own person, which I guess is why I respect her so much. She's got black hair too and violet eyes.

My sister is Deanna Rose Fenton, who is a major pain in my butt, but that's just normal sibling stuff. She's a spritely talkative seven-year-old who never stops asking questions. She's super outgoing and smart. Her hair is black and in pigtails, and she got Dd's blue eyes.

It was around May when we decided to move. Dad had just gotten a job offer to teach at the community college in his and Mom's old hometown, Amity Park. That was where they'd met, grown up, had their first date, got married, had me. Dad snapped up the offer quicker whata Venus fly trap, and the whole family was packed up and ready to go before the school year even ended.

"Look at it this way," Dad said, "You get an even longer summer vacation."

So then we were all stuck in the car for a boring, week-long drive to Amity Park, complete with swerving, smelly gas stations, hotel rooms, swearing, and road rage. A trailer full of all our belongings was hooked up to the back of our car, and the rest of it was crammed into the trunk. Deanna Rose and Dad decied to pass the time with I Spy, Liscense Alphabet, and sing-alongs, where Mom and I groaned and covered our ears to block out the ghastly noise. I'm surprised we all didn't go completly crazy or get carsick.

By the time we got to Amity Park, we were all so ready to get out of the car that we practically jumped out of the windows when we pulled into our new driveway. I think Mom kissed the ground for a good two mintues, but I didn't have my watch to make sure.

The next day, the entire family visited Grandma and Grandpa Fenton.

Maddie Fenton is my grandmother. She's a tall, intelligent woman with graying bright red hair and purple eyes. My grandfather is Jack Fenton. He's a wide tower of a man who's simple but sweet. He has white hair and cobalt eyes.

Both of them used to be fervent ghost hunters. They knew absolutely everything about ghosts; where they came from, what they were made of, why they looked the way they do. Grandma and Grandpa dedicated their lives to the paranormal, and had loads of interesting stories of researches and hunts.

When we got to their house, I thought a UFO had landed on their roof. Dad assured me it was the Ops center, where most of their ghost hunting equipment. The Ops center is a huge cylandar-shaped metal dome on the top of my grandparents' house, along with a huge blinking LED sign pointing to their house that read 'Fentonworks.'

We'd had a good ol' Fenton family reunion. Grandma and Grandpa gushed at me and Deanna Rose, talked with Mom and Dad. In under three hours, my grandparents were caught up on the last fourteen years. They all laughed at stories, beamed with pride at good grades and accomplishments. Of course, most of those weren't mine.

To be honest, our first few weeks in Amity Park weren't really all that exciting. We all sat around the house, unpacked boxes, slept, and ate. Me being me, I locked myself up in my room, only coming out to use the bathroom or eat. I knew Mom didn't approve; she thought all that alone time wasn't good for me and my mental health, or some junk like that. I was just trying to get alone time while I could, because the worst thing in the world was coming:

School was starting up again. I was to be pitted against some of the most vicious creatures of the cosmos: teachers, drama, and unneccessarily complex homework, all on top of raging teenage hormones.

I thought it would be a fresh start for me. We just moved here, and none of the kids I was going to school with wouldn't know me. Maybe it would be better here. No fights, no bad grades, no one getting under my skin.

Boy, was I _wrong._


End file.
